For those of you who
love to wade through the plethora of standard reports offered by Google
Analytics and spend hours mulling over reams of data trying to find that
elusive key metric please feel free to skip this article.However, if like most
of us you want quick access to key web analytics custom reporting data
and your boss (and his boss!) are breathing down your neck then look no
further than the superb blog post written by the outstanding Avinash Kaushik over at Google.Read More

Choosing the right software for your website is critical

Last year over 10 million US small businesses were prioritizing their
online business(Forrester), yet managing it is still a nightmare of
confusion and complexity. It’s that nightmare that BigTurns puts to rest with it's "Sales and marketing software for websites", a web-based
application that makes setting up online easy with all the tools that
business owners need to succeed. In contrast to existing solutions, BigTurns completely replaces traditional web hosting with a
business-oriented approach that puts the spotlight on understanding
your customers and getting better results – while saving time and
money.

Marketing Trends and Specialized Systems Slow Business Down

Building an online business is hard work for small business owners.
Modern trends in marketing toward blogging and email marketing simply
highlight that business owners need more than a plain website. Web
analytics, online shopping and lead management are also high on the
list of priorities, but vendor selection is daunting and their approach
specialized. “In many cases, business owners are working with a fistful
of disconnected systems to manage their online business. That means
they need to waste time importing and exporting data to keep the
systems in sync,” BigTurns' Operations Manager Aidan Leonard says.

BigTurns - A One Stop Solution

BigTurns takes an integrated approach to online businesses with a
results focused attitude. By incorporating website management, lead
management, email marketing, online shopping, blogs, and business
analytics, BigTurns is a one stop solution. Most importantly, BigTurns offers a customer centric vision of your website, with
every feature integrated into a central customer database. This means
businesses can automatically build customer profiles and track behavior
across their online business, to make better decisions and improve
profits.

Less Time, Less Money, Better Results

The
result is that businesses are saving time and money while achieving
more online. “We’ve got customers telling us that using BigTurns is
saving them a day of work a week,” Leonard says. And while being able to
access so many vital features of your business from a central console
is a huge benefit for business owners, there’s a significant cost
benefit too, according to Aidan. “You could spend 5 times as much for
a solution comparable to BigTurns – and it would need to be custom
built by programmers. Our customers are spending less money, and
getting more.”

BigTurns runs inside any web browser with no downloads required,
and no time consuming setup. The software will be offered on an
affordable subscription basis comparable to current web hosting costs.
Currently in private beta, you can request an invitation to use
BigTurns for 30 days by going to www.BigTurns.com

BigTurns creates software to empower small business owners to take
their business online with less fuss and better results.

If you’d like more information on BigTurns, a live
product demo or an interview with Charles Brodeur, please contact us here: http://www.bigturns.com/ecommerce/vancouverCanada/contactUs

Research Sources

Data Source: Forrester
report: “Making Sense Of Hosted Commerce Platforms” – 44% of small
businesses (roughly 24 million small businesses are operating in the
USA) listed internet or ecommerce initiatives as a priority or critical
priority.

Relevance is the right content sent to the right audience, which results in high response rates, delivery rates and reader engagement. Advances in email list management software and customers’ increasing willingness to provide specific information about their preferences mean that email marketers can now use sophisticated segmentation in email campaigns to tailor messaging to be more relevant than ever.

Now, marketers can provide different messages to many different segments of their database, using all sorts of factors that affect buying behavior. This procedure, called segmenting, allows you to create a series of highly-focused mailing lists without having to re-enter the data every time or require subscribers to sign up for many different mailing lists in order to get the email they really want. Read More

How do you interpret your results? What metrics are available and which are the best metrics to determine success? The
following is a list of the basics, their priority, how to read them and how to use them to refine content:

Open Rate

This metric indicates how often a recipient opened your email. Since so many emails go ignored, it’s good to know how many got subscribers› attention. However, don’t be misled into believing that every opened email was actually read and digested – in some cases, email is scanned and dumped, opened by mistake or only opened to find the unsubscribe link. Open rate is not the best indicator of email success; however, it can be a great pre-response indicator and also a great way to get results on content or subject line testing.

Click-Through Rate

This is a metric that lets you know how often a recipient clicked on a specific link in your email to either go to your website or to take another action. Again, it’s a pre-response indicator, but it can let you know what content and actions in your email are the most attractive to the reader and give you a good idea of what part of the email was of most interest. Be sure and look at each link separately to determine the winners. Also look at the comparison of click-through to conversion or response. Did people click on your email links (showing interest) and lose it when they got to the response area? This could be an indication that your response form either asks for too much information, the offer doesn’t pay off as promised in your email or that somehow you lost the reader’s interest.

Conversion or Response Rate

This is absolutely the most important metric. All email has a call-to-action, and this metric answers the question, “Did recipients convert to the action you wanted them to take?” Did they sign up for a subscription? Make a purchase? For most email marketers, the question about whether or not someone bought is the most important metric of all.

Unsubscribes and Spam Complaints

The unsubscribe metric is becoming less important over time. Since consumers are getting so overwhelmed with email, many don’t even take the time to unsubscribe or report email as spam. So in most cases, you’ll find that those people not interested will simply delete your email without reading it. But watch this metric for spikes that could indicate that your content is off base. And any spikes in spam complaints can adversely affect your deliverability so it’s important that you pay attention and take action to avoid this.

Lead generation is a tough thing to do. It takes time, lots of time, and the results are few and far between.

We have put together a system for generating leads that motivates, automates, and provides results. It's a bit complicated and has taken some years to perfect but now it's working and I'm going to show you how to do it for your own business.

The system is a 6 part Sales & Marketing System for lead generation. Read More